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The Cost of Poor Software Quality [INFOGRAPHIC]

Software quality is important – just about every executive knows that. But recognizing that concept in the abstract is one thing, while actually investing time and resources toward developing and releasing high-quality software is quite another. The fact of the matter is that, many CTOs and other executives don’t ultimately make software testing a top-level priority.

This can be a serious mistake.

The reality of the situation is that there are serious costs associated with poor-quality software. It’s not just a question of undermining the company’s reputation – although that has its own costs, as this recent blog post explained. It’s also a matter that’s directly reflected in the bottom line.

Consider this: Each year, companies around the globe spend more than $300 billion debugging their software, according to research from Cambridge University’s Judge Business School. Additionally, Parasoft research determined that the stock price for companies experiencing a news-making software failure fell about 4 percent on average in 2015, and 5.7 percent when they suffered multiple failures. That equaled $2.7 billion in lost market capitalization.

Not only are these huge figures, but they represent money that is – in a very real way – purely wasted.

Of course, you may be thinking that you already debug and software failures are going to happen no matter what. But the Systems Sciences Institute at IBM found that it costs four- to five-times as much to fix a software bug after release, rather than during the design process, Celerity reported. If companies truly made software quality testing a priority, they would be much more likely to find software issues early on, when the cost to correct these errors is much lower.

Taken all together, it’s easy to see that software quality has a real financial impact on the corporate bottom line, and the best way to avoid the costs of poor-quality software is by fully embracing software testing and test management tools.

To help visualize the negative impact that poor software quality can have on your bottom line we’ve created the following infographic. Take a look to see some recent statistics from industry analysts: